Abstract
<jats:p>The Ottoman Empire possessed a multi-religious social structure whose continuity was maintained through legal and administrative mechanisms. While Muslims, Christians, and Jews preserved their religious identities within the imperial framework, conversion was a closely monitored and regulated process at both the individual and public levels. Because religious conversion had direct consequences for taxation, legal and social status, family structure, and communal affiliation, it became a matter of concern for the Ottoman legal order. In this context, the sharia courts constituted the primary institutional arena in which cases of ihtidā (conversion) were recorded, supervised, and given legal effect; they also produced the principal documentation that verified the procedural validity of conversion and secured the legal standing of new Muslims. This study examines the social and legal contexts of religious conversion in the Ottoman provinces through cases recorded in the sixteenth- to nineteenth-century court registers of the district of Rodosçuk. It challenges interpretations that portray ihtidā as a coercive and one-directional policy of Islamization, demonstrating instead that legal protection and economic opportunity could function both as outcomes of conversion and as enabling preconditions. The study also questions assumptions about systematic judicial bias against non-Muslims, emphasizing that in the Rodosçuk example the courts operated as a neutral forum accessible to different confessional communities. The evidence suggests that conversion unfolded through slow, gradual, and largely individual processes shaped by the combined influence of religious, economic, and social motivations.</jats:p>